I. Michael Heyman, who led the University of California at Berkeley through controversies over state budget cuts and race-based admission policies in the 1980s and continued wading in politically charged waters as chief executive of the Smithsonian Institution from 1994 to 2000, died of emphysema Nov. 19 at his home in Berkeley. He was 81.
His death was confirmed by UC-Berkeley, where Mr. Heyman was a professor emeritus of law and city and regional planning.
Mr. Heyman was often described as the first non-scientist Smithsonian secretary. Nonetheless, the 6-foot-5, white-haired Mr. Heyman exuded a scholarly, intellectually imposing air.
He was a Marine Corps veteran of the Korean War and a Yale Law School graduate. He was chief clerk to Earl Warren — the liberal-minded chief justice of the United States — before joining the Berkeley law faculty in 1959.
From the start of his career, Mr. Heyman seemed to insert himself in controversial roles. At Berkeley in the 1960s, he led a university investigation into student conduct during the Free Speech movement that spurred campus sit-ins and demonstrations.
Mr. Heyman once broke a gavel to silence a hostile crowd of students but eventually drafted a report sympathetic to the students’ goals of the right to political protest at Berkeley.
Starting in 1980, Mr. Heyman began his decade-long chancellorship of Berkeley, the flagship campus of the University of California system. He recruited blacks and Latinos to the university to address their underrepresentation in the student body.
Non-Anglos accounted for 51 percent of the student body in 1988, compared with 34 percent in 1980, the Los Angles Times reported. The change led to considerable tensions.
Some on the Berkeley faculty said Mr. Heyman moved too quickly and compromised the quality of the student population, and many members of the Asian community also felt discriminated against in admissions policies.
In 1989, Mr. Heyman publicly apologized for admissions policies that “indisputably had a disproportionate impact on Asians.”
Another facet of Mr. Heyman’s legacy at Berkeley was fundraising. Facing state budget cuts, he initiated the first major fundraising effort in the university’s history, said John Cummins, a former associate chancellor.
Mr. Heyman was credited with raising hundreds of millions of dollars. This money was crucial to constructing science buildings and making the university more competitive in biological sciences, Cummins said.
In 1994, Mr. Heyman was selected as the Smithsonian Institution’s 10th secretary. At the time, he was on the Smithsonian Board of Regents and was a legal adviser to Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt.
Many saw Mr. Heyman’s fundraising and administrative experience as a boon to one of the world’s largest museum and research complexes. The Smithsonian receives hundreds of millions of dollars in federal money, but the institution faced potential funding cuts and layoffs.
More immediately, Mr. Heyman addressed a crisis over a planned exhibit of the Enola Gay, the U.S. military airplane that dropped the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.
Loading...
Comments